★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
This latest real-life retelling makes it a genre hat-trick
for the Peter Berg-Mark Wahlberg duet, though the formula is showing signs of
wear. Wahlberg stars as a composite character cop, Tommy Saunders, caught up in
the events of the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013 and the subsequent manhunt.
I’ve so far held Berg in very high esteem after the
eye-gouging nihilism of Lone Survivor and
tragic visual mastery of Deepwater Horizon,
though the latter’s script issues have begun to take deeper root: Patriots Day tends to fall a tad on the flag-waving
side. It may entirely depend on where you draw the line between solidarity and jingoism,
but I think the film is at least somewhat self-aware enough to avoid such a
potentially divisive realm of thinking. A
steely Kevin Bacon plays FBI agent Richard DesLauriers, who impresses upon
everyone the dangers of even indirectly mentioning the terrorist’s chosen faith
in the immediate aftermath. As the attackers were not suicide bombers but
remained at large for several days, this danger is doubly felt.
The film is equally conscious about the inherent coldness of
situational recreations, which emerged as a necessity from day one – many felt
the decision to make the film so swiftly following the tragedy was a step too
far. As the mouthpiece for this disgust, Saunders is the only one to display
signs of protest at when a reconstruction of the scene is required for forensic
analysis, mere hours after the first blast.
Wahlberg continues to shine as an everyman; though his
characters in Berg’s previous movies were based on actual people, they still
carried that sense of home-grown loyalty and indiscriminate anguish when their
respective worlds collapsed. Saunders is a fictional person, but feels as real as
Marcus Luttrell or Mike Williams, in dramatic contrast to the insufferable
science teacher from The Happening or
the beer-swigging dad in Transformers:
Age of Extinction. Berg’s realist style continues to extend to the
supporting faces on screen, too. Those introduced in various opening montages (a
love-struck young couple, a bright-eyed police officer, a Chinese student) are people
first, characters second.
Patriots Day takes
the shape of an epic thriller in lieu of a minute-by-minute playback, and (by
the very nature of how the events played out) occasionally feels stretched but
never overwrought. As the walls close in on the two perpetrators, it feels like
a long-gestating climax, for both the police forces and the audience. The finale
is respectful and satisfying, but the ‘Boston Strong’ coda emerges completely
from left-field. Up until the conclusion, Berg has never allowed displayed the city as a character
in itself, the preceding investigation solidly told but the huge array of
characters means there’s nothing like the burning urgency of Survivor nor Deepwater. Composer Steve Jablonsky is swapped out for Trent Reznor
and Atticus Ross, and the haunting Americana of his scores is sorely missed,
and endemic of what holds the film back from complete success. It’s a quality
effort, but the true emotional core is reduced to bookends.
